International Journal of Education & the Arts
Editors
Liora Bresler
University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign, U.S.A.
Margaret Macintyre Latta
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, U.S.A.
http://www.ijea.org
Volume 9 Number 2
ISBN 1529-8094
February 17, 2008
Teacher as Performer:
Unpacking a metaphor in performance theory
and critical performative pedagogy
Monica Prendergast
University of British Columbia, Canada
Citation: Prendergast, M. (2008). Teacher as performer: Unpacking a metaphor in
performance theory and critical performative pedagogy. International Journal of
Education & the Arts, 9(2). Retrieved [date] from http://www.ijea.org/v9n2/.
Abstract
This survey paper explores the interdisciplinary literature of performance theory and
critical performative pedagogy in an attempt to consider metaphorical applications of
performance to pedagogy. This exploration involves looking at teaching as
performance in the broadest cultural sense of the word – interested more in efficacy of
communication and mutual empathetic understanding – than in the more commonlyheld economic, technological and political senses of performance which are more
interested in setting, raising, and maintaining standards of efficiency and effectiveness
(see McKenzie, 2001). In examining these issues in both performance studies and
education, the conclusions are that educational researchers and teacher educators can
benefit significantly from a critical awareness of the proliferation of metaphors for
teaching as performance that highlight both aesthetic and socio-political challenges
inherent in a life in the classroom.
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Introduction: Tracing a Metaphor
Teaching quite easily lends itself to performative metaphors; the 'captive audience' of students
in a classroom, the teacher onstage at the front of the room, charged with the tasks of
engagement and enlightenment, even (in Egan's [1986] model) storytelling. However, as
someone who moved from the professional theatre into teaching practice many years ago, I
have become increasingly troubled by the seemingly fashionable appropriation of the
performance metaphor – more broadly construed and understood in the relatively new and
hybrid field of performance studies – and its at times, haphazard and narrowly-focused
application to pedagogy. The aim of this essay therefore, is to step back from the staged
spectacle of teaching as performance as it has appeared in recent literature within education,
in order to both survey how this metaphor has been applied, both judiciously and perhaps less
so, and to offer some potentially new ways of seeing the work of teaching and learning
through performance lenses. It is hoped that the latter task of this essay might have some
resonance with those in educational research and/or teacher education who might be further
encouraged to think through the vibrant and complex interconnectivity between pedagogical
and performance practices.
The essay is organized into three sections. First, I will introduce performance theory and
studies by highlighting the work of major theorists in this field whose work is judged to be
particularly germane to pedagogical practice. Second, I move to an overview of how
performance has been applied to education, specifically in the area of critical pedagogy,
sometimes now called critical performative pedagogy (Pineau, 2002), thus confirming the
impact performance theory has had in this sphere, albeit at times somewhat unrigorously
applied. Finally, I conclude on a strong note of caution in reminding readers that performance
is a very slippery, ephemeral, and contested term that intentionally poses as many, if not more
questions than it answers when asked to serve a master other than its own. Educational
researchers and teacher educators who are drawn to the teaching is performance metaphor will
be well-served by attending more closely to the field of performance studies and its theories.
Part I
Performance as Metaphor for Pedagogy
Ways of Seeing Teaching in Performance Theory
This first section presents the work of three significant contemporary American performance
theorists – Bert O. States (1996), Richard Schechner (1988/2003, 2002), and Jon McKenzie
(2001) – as a way of both introducing the field of performance theory to those unfamiliar with
it and to explore the metaphorical ways performance concepts might be applied to pedagogical
practices.
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Bert O States: Performance as Metaphor
Sociologist Erving Goffman (1959) argues that we perform our everyday lives, and his work
has had great effect on the development of performance theory. So, the broadest metaphor we
can apply to performance is as life. This, of course, is mimesis. But this is also a very broad
metaphor indeed, and one that needs some fine-tuning, some focusing, in order to become
clearly useful in the context of this essay. Fortunately, performance theorist Bert O. States
(1996) has written on performance as metaphor in a way that helps achieve this tighter focus
as he offers a number of distinct theoretical metaphors for performance that have been
employed, including Schechner's contributions, in the establishment of the field of
performance studies over the past thirty years or so. Each of these metaphors is examined and
problematized by States. He concludes with his own metaphor of performance as a way of
seeing.
Bert O. States’ article in Theatre Journal, “Performance as Metaphor” (1996) is essential
reading in performance theory, as it troubles many of the assumptions, clothed in metaphor,
that have guided the development of the field. I offer a diagrammatic summary of this work
below, because to cover this lengthy material more comprehensively would be to carry my
reader away from my central mission; that is, to explore the metaphor of teacher as performer.
This chart shows how States lays out and questions the roots and values of a number of
metaphors for performance found in theory.
Note: The INSIDE/OUTSIDE heading refers to States’ delineation of whether or not a theorist
is an ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ of performance theory.
THEORIST
INSIDE/OUTSIDE
METAPHOR
Raymond
Williams
Outside/Cultural Studies
Performance as Keyword
Erving
Goffman
Outside/Sociology
Performance as Social
Behavior/Everyday Life
Victor Turner
Outside/
Anthropology
Performance as Social
Conflicts/Dramas
QUESTIONS/PROBLEMS
How can we be clear about
defining keywords when they are
“inextricably bound up with the
problems [they are] being used to
discuss”, both ideologically and
methodologically (Williams in
States, p. 2)?
What are the ways in which we
repeat ourselves (p. 5)? What
isn’t performance in this
definition, and therefore
somewhat meaningless (p. 5)?
How do we resolve the
“metaphorically vacant” tautology
of performance as social conflict
as drama as performance (p. 5)?
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Peggy Phelan
Inside/
Performance Art &
Performance Studies
Performance as
Appearance/Disappearance/Presence/
Performativity
Richard
Schechner
Inside/ Theatre &
Performance Studies
Performance as Restored &
Twice-behaved behavior
Robert P.
Crease
Outside/Philosophy
Performance as Science
(Presentation/
Representation/
Recognition)/
Transformation
Bert O. States
Inside/Theatre &
Performance Studies
Performance as Way of
Seeing
Where does Phelan’s metaphor
move us beyond “evoking a
principle that has a long history in
aesthetics and does not define
performance or performance art
any more than it defines any other
kind of art” (p. 13)?
When do qualities such as
“immediacy, ephemerality,
peculiarity, and everchangingness” apply to more than
performance, as in almost any
process or action (quote from
Schechner in States, p. 13)?
When any behavior is learned, is
it then not also possibly restored
or twice-behaved as well?
How do the science and
performance of transformation
provide “the fundamental pleasure
at the very core of mind and
memory” (p. 21)? How do
Crease’s four categories of
performance – “failed, mechanical
repetition, standardized, and
artistic” (p. 22) – become usefully
applied to the task of defining the
field of performance?
Where is performance located if
defined as “seeing that involves
certain collaborative and
contextual functions (between
work and spectator) which are
highly elastic” (p. 12)? How does
defining performance as “the
simultaneity of producing
something and responding to it in
the same behavioral act” work as a
phenomenological understanding
(p. 25)?
Table 1: Summary chart of Bert O. States’ “Performance as Metaphor” (1996)
What becomes clearer for me, from this text and the summary chart, is the danger that
performance can easily slip into becoming an over-generalized term, like ‘culture’, that tries to
Prendergast: Teacher as Performer
5
be all things to all people at all times and thereby tends to lose its force and become diffuse.
Small wonder that it has so often been described as an “essentially contested concept” (Strine,
Long & Hopkins, 1990, cited in Stucky & Wimmer, 2002, p. 10; Carlson, 1996/2004, p. 1)!
The enthusiasm on the part of these writers to embrace performance as a metaphor for such
broad-ranging comparatives as listed above gives me a welcome sense of caution as I proceed.
However, these metaphors can also be critically examined for their utility within this present
paper, in that they offer multi-faceted views of performance that may be usefully considered in
metaphorical relationship with pedagogy. In other words, how may we begin to think about
teaching as acts of: social behavior, social conflict, appearance/disappearance, presence,
restored or twice-behaved behavior, transformation, and pleasure/desire? While examining all
of these metaphorical resonances with pedagogy lies beyond the reaches of this essay, anyone
interested in this metaphorical analysis would be well-served by following States' path and
surveying the broad range of theorists who have approached performance in so many diverse
ways.
What I also see here is a metaphorical pattern in all of these performance theories where
performance is compared to something larger than itself. I suggest that this may be
symptomatic of a somewhat defensive posture, often taken by a relatively new and therefore
marginal field attempting to establish itself within academia. As such, I begin to see that these
larger-than-life metaphors for performance offered up by both 'inside' and 'outside' theorists
need to be approached with caution. These interdisciplinary boundaries must be held with
some care, as it becomes quite easy (as seen in States’ critique) to fly off the surface of the
planet when enticed into embracing all-encompassing metaphors. This being said, I do see
much value in laying out these metaphors for examination and reflection in this present
context. Certainly, they serve my purpose in arguing for the importance of reading broadly in
performance theory before drawing on the word 'performance' and applying it in education. To
raise the status of performance, through metaphor, to the level of being enacted in everyday
life, social conflict or even science itself, creates space for performance as a method to more
deeply understand pedagogy.
States himself is a phenomenologist, thus his own metaphorical definition of performance as a
way of seeing is one rooted in the sense of essential experience that makes up the condition of
performance. May this notion not also be effectively applied to teaching—that we as teachers
are always performing the way we see the world through our own lived experiences—for and
with our students? We, as States goes on to suggest, are engaged in performative activities of
pleasure and desire (psychoanalytic terms mostly absent from educational discourse), and of
transformation (from lesser to greater knowledge, developing understanding and agency in the
world) that happen in simultaneity with our students in the pedagogical acts of teaching and
learning.
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Richard Schechner: Performance Studies
I move on to examine more closely the work of field-founder Richard Schechner, one of the
key theorists included in States' critical survey discussed above, and a scholar who writes with
a voracious and capacious appetite for performance in all its forms. The primary reason for
selecting Schechner over any other of the theorists covered by States (including States
himself) is that Schechner literally 'wrote the book' on performance theory (1988/2003) and
therefore is deserving of our attention in this introductory section. Schechner has the added
validity, in my eyes, of being a renowned theatre artist as well as performance theorist, which
cannot be said of all in this field. It is a daunting task to summarize his contributions here, so I
will simply attempt to sketch out his more broadly-based understandings of performance in
art, culture, society, politics and everyday life.
Schechner has written papers, editorials, and books over the past 35 years that have served to
create the interdisciplinary field of performance studies [PS]. PS draws on drama and theatre
studies, cultural studies, anthropology, oral interpretation, and various critical theories, or what
Schechner calls the “broad spectrum” or “continuum” approach to performance (1990; 2002,
p. 2). His main argument is that seeing the world we live in as a performance allows us to
understand more keenly the roles we play, and the roles that are played for us, in all aspects of
our lives whenever we engage in “twice-behaved” or “restored” behavior; that is, any human
behavior that can consciously be repeated over time for various purposes (Schechner, 1985, p.
35). Influenced by sociologist Goffman (1959) and anthropologist Victor Turner (1977, 1986),
Schechner’s early anthropological studies to India, Asia, and elsewhere enriched his
understanding of the deep connections between ritual and performance. Schechner’s own
theatre directing practice in the American avant-garde theatre from the 1960’s to the present
also informs his philosophy of performance that he sees, in a postmodern way, as uniquely
situated and context-driven aesthetic/ritualistic forms of experience. He says in the preface to
the third edition of his key text Performance Theory (1988/2003) that in his journeys as
performance anthropologist and theatre director he “did not abandon the performing arts but
placed them in active relation to social life, ritual, play, games, sports, and other popular
entertainments” (p. xi). Research in PS, led by Schechner’s long-held editorship of The Drama
Review, has examined and analyzed a wide range of performance practices, with a special
interest in intercultural practices, avant-garde theatre, and performance art.
In the context of this present paper, I am interested in drawing on the contributions of PS and
applying them specifically to pedagogy (see also Stucky & Wimmer, 2002). An important
aspect of Schechner’s work is his undying radicalism. Schechner often prefaces his writings
with concerns about the state of the world: “A long neomedieval period has begun”
(Schechner, 1993, p. 19); “The current means of cultural interaction – globalization – enacts
extreme imbalances of power, money, access to media, and control over resources”
(Schechner, 2002, p. 2); or:
Prendergast: Teacher as Performer
7
We live under terrible stress. Politically, intellectually, artistically, personally and
epistemologically we are at breaking points. It is a cliché to say that society is in crisis.
But ours, particularly here on the North American continent, seems gripped by total
crisis and faced with either disintegration or brutal, sanctioned repression.
(Schechner, 1988/2003, p. 31)
Thus, his project in creating the field of PS is to apply the critical lenses that allow us to see
many aspects of existence as performances. This then allows us to see that performances are
created, constructed, and coded for very specific socio-political purposes—be they reactionary
or revolutionary in nature. From this politically resistant stance, Schechner's work is resonant
with the scholarship of critical pedagogy, to which I will later return.
Schechner’s (1993) theories metaphorically applied to teaching allow teachers and teacher
educators to consider performance (of pedagogy) as involving “four great spheres: . . .
entertainment, healing, education, and ritualizing . . . in play with each other” (p. 20). While
Westernized culture often sees performance solely as entertainment, Schechner pushes
performers and spectators (or teachers and students within pedagogical practices) to reflect on
what they may be doing and witnessing as potentially healing (to selves and to society),
educational (that is, geared towards growth and change), and connected to ritualistic practices
of diverse cultures, including—historically—our own. Schechner studies the interconnections
between play, games, sports, and sacred and secular rituals as forms of performance. How
might these interconnections apply both metaphorically and pragmatically to pedagogy? To
consider pedagogy as involving intertwining performance processes of entertainment
(aesthetic engagement), healing (therapeutic practices), and ritual (cross-cultural practices)
that are incorporated into education (curriculum and pedagogy interested in transformative
processes) seems a good place to begin. From Schechner's foundational work, I now move on
to a third key contribution to performance theory that focuses explicitly on performance's
metaphoric qualities and applications.
Jon McKenzie: Grand Theory
The third and final performance theory study presented here examining performance as
metaphor is Jon McKenzie’s (2001) 'grand theory' of performance, which looks at how
performance is understood in the domains of culture, technology and economics. Perform or
else: From discipline to performance is an audacious attempt “to rehearse a general theory of
performance” (p. 4).
McKenzie traces the use of the word performance in three distinct fields of contemporary
society: culture, economics, and technology.
Culture. In culture, he tracks the development of PS over the past thirty years. He
suggests that cultural performance is centrally concerned with issues of social efficacy; that is
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to say, how performance positively assists us in understanding ourselves, seeing ourselves, reforming ourselves in relation to the culture that surrounds us, and/or transforming the culture
itself through performative actions (pp. 29-54).
Economics. Next, McKenzie sees the term “performance management” (p. 55) used in
relation to questions and standards of efficiency as they apply to economics. Organizational
theory looks at the efficiency of individuals and organizations within a capitalist society that is
concerned with “the bottom line: maximizing outputs and minimizing inputs” (p. 81). This
economic model of performance and efficiency has recently come to carry more and more
influence in the field of education. Students complete standardized tests that measure their
academic performance. Teachers and schools, in their turn, are judged and rated according to
the relative success or failure of these performances. Young people are taught that they are
preparing themselves to enter an adult world where, as McKenzie’s title dictates, they must
“perform – or else”.
Technology. The third field McKenzie surveys is that of technology, where he sees the
primary challenge of performance being that of effectiveness. After listing over seventy
products and companies that include the word performance in their title (pp. 104-106),
McKenzie states that: “This use of ‘performance’ to market everything from carpets and
computers to mops and manifolds indicates one thing: for specialists and nonspecialists alike,
technologies perform” (p. 106). “Technological performance, as engineered and evaluated by
Techno-Performance researchers, refers to the behaviors and properties that technologies
exhibit while executing specific tasks in specific contexts” (p. 130). Computers, missiles, and
cars are all subjected to trials that measure their respective performances. Billions of dollars,
for example, have been invested since the early nineties in the development of “high
performance technologies” and networks—super-fast and super-smart ways to successfully
compete in a global market (p. 98).
In his next theoretical move, McKenzie draws comparisons among these three fields, noting
how, although used in different ways (as scripted narrative, as theatricality, as self-reflection,
as social criticism and/or action), the metaphor of theatre can be found in each one. More
importantly, he sees the notion of challenge to be at the core of performance, however and
wherever it may be used and found. The challenges of social efficacy, organizational
efficiency, and technological effectiveness are global, transnational challenges that must be
faced and met with success or failure on all of our parts. The threads he pulls between and
among these disparate fields of performance lead him to “a speculative analogy” (p. 176) that:
Performance will be to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
What discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth:
An onto-historical formation of power and knowledge.
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9
My interest in McKenzie’s general theory of performance, which he names perfumance (p.
203), lies in its relevance to pedagogy. If McKenzie is right, and I think he is, his voice is a
strong cry for a seismic-level shift in education. If young people can learn to perceive and
interpret the world and themselves in it as an interconnected series of performers, spectators,
and performances at multiple levels of society, is there then a possibility for them to gain more
agency to resist the powerful forces that push them to perform for military-industrial,
consumerist, and technocratic ends? If we think about how teaching as performance has been
applied within teacher education, for example, it does not take much effort for us to see how
most often performance is situated in contexts of technological effectiveness and economic
efficiency rather than cultural efficacy. This leads directly to a quite hidden but equally potent
message delivered through teacher education programs that teachers are charged with
producing and reproducing performances of efficiency and effectiveness, both in themselves
and in their classrooms. This essentially anti-aesthetic position taken toward how we think
about teacher performance goes a long way to explain the estimated 25 to 50% attrition rate in
trained teachers never entering or leaving teaching in the first five years of their careers
(Darling-Hammond, 2000, p. 168; Heyns, 1988, p. 25). If someone enters teacher training with
any aesthetic sensibility in their background or philosophy toward pedagogy, it becomes
intensely difficult to hold onto and maintain that stance within a system that views
performance in such profoundly different ways; as challenges that involve performing. . . or
else. This is my personal story, and I suspect it is a shared story with many others who began
and left careers in classroom teaching because of these irreconcilable differences around the
question of how pedagogy is to be performed.
To conclude this first section, we have examined three prominent performance theorists who
see performance as complex processes of: entertainment, education, healing, ritual, social
behaviour, social conflict, appearance/disappearance, presence, restored or twice-behaved
behavior, transformation, pleasure/desire, ways of seeing, efficiency, effectiveness, efficacy,
and challenge. Each of these definitions offers possible pathways for consideration as
metaphors for pedagogy, as follows:
Teacher as
● entertainer
● educator
● healer
● ritualizer
● social behaviorist
● social conflict instigator/resolver
● apparent/disapparent
● present
● restorer of twice-behaved behaviours
● transformer
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●
●
●
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pleasurer and desirer
seer
challenger (in efficacy/efficiency/effectiveness)
Questions leading from this list include: How are each of these performance characteristics
made manifest in the act of pedagogy? What metaphors are more or less troubling or
challenging than others? How do each of these metaphors provide an efficacious response to
understandings of performance in education that are more rooted in economic or technological
notions of efficiency and effectiveness?
I now move to an overview of how teaching as performance has been theorized in the field of
education itself.
Part II
Teaching as Performance: Performative Pedagogy
To begin, teaching as performance is a metaphor that has had some life in educational
scholarship, primarily over the past twenty years. Elyse Lamm Pineau’s 1994 essay,
“Teaching is performance: Reconceptualizing a problematic metaphor” (recently reprinted in
Alexander, Anderson & Gallegos, 2005, pp. 15-39) gives an effective historic and theoretical
overview of this metaphor at work, much like States' contribution in performance studies. She
cites much of the literature on this topic: “Classroom artistry” (Barrell, 1991); “Teaching: A
performing art” (Dawe, 1984); The Educational Imagination (Eisner, 1979); Teaching as
Storytelling (Egan, 1986); and, Artistry in Teaching (Rubin, 1985). While many of these
earlier contributions address teaching artistry and educational poetics, few of them move
beyond views of teacher as actor or artist and there is little or no interdisciplinary dialogue
with the then-emerging field of PS. In an important and much-needed move in this direction,
Pineau herself discusses performance theorist Dwight Conquergood’s (1989) four qualities of
performance and applies them to education; poetics, play, process, and power. These qualities
help Pineau highlight performative aspects of teaching practice that she delineates as aesthetic,
innovative, subversive, processual, and critical. She then “invites interdisciplinary research
into the nature of educational performance and the development of performative pedagogy”
(Pineau, 1994/2005, pp. 36-37, emphasis added).
In the over twelve years since Pineau's essay first appeared, there has indeed been some
scholarly attention paid to questions arising from both these areas of investigation: How and
what does education perform? And when and where may pedagogy be seen as performative?
Four key contributions on these topics will be addressed in this section; schooling as ritual
performance by Peter McLaren (1986/1993) from an even earlier study, Charles Garoian's
(1999) study on performing pedagogy, Bryant K. Alexander (2005) on pedagogical
Prendergast: Teacher as Performer
11
interactions as performance, and R. Keith Sawyer (2004) on teaching as improvisational
performance.
Peter McLaren: Ritual Performance
Probably the earliest educational study to draw on performance theories is Peter McLaren's
(1986/1993) Schooling as a ritual performance: Towards a political economy of educational
symbols and gestures, an ethnography using a ritological framework to present a detailed
portrait of a Toronto Catholic high school. McLaren draws on the field of ritual studies,
primarily the work of Ronald Grimes and Victor Turner, in order to begin to see the ritualized
aspects of daily life in schools, especially those liminal or marginal spaces that are “[t]he state
and process of mid-transition in a rite of passage” (Turner, 1979, cited in McLaren, p. 300):
Liminars [participants in a ritual] are stripped of status and authority, removed from a
socialstructure maintained and sanctioned by power and force, and leveled to a
homogeneous social state through discipline and ordeal. . . . Much of what has been
bound by social structure is liberated, notably the sense of comradeship and
communion, or communitas. (Turner, 1979, cited in McLaren, p. 300)
McLaren outlines three metaphors for teaching that arise from his fieldwork: teacher-asliminal-servant; teacher-as-entertainer; and teacher-as-hegemonic-overlord (p. 113). From
the standpoint of critical pedagogy (McLaren's location), the first metaphor is the most
desirable; this is when a teacher is capable of conducting an “authentic ritual of instruction”
wherein students become “co-celebrants of knowledge with [the] teacher” in a “liberatory
pedagogy” (p. 114). This process is “shamanic”, according to McLaren: “A sanctified
curriculum 'moment' during which students bore witness to the universal wisdom embodied in
the rites of instruction” (p. 114). Needless to say, these moments are quite few and far between
in all but the most exceptional of teachers and McLaren notes that he most often witnessed the
teacher-as-liminal-servant in religion classes where students were invited to consider the
mysteries of the Catholic faith in relation to their own lives (p. 117). Interestingly, later on in
his concluding chapter, McLaren notes that: “Considering the dramatic qualities of ritual, it
would appear instructive for both drama theorists and ritologists to begin to forge connections
between ritual and drama applicable to the creation of improved curricular programming” (p.
243). This metaphor of teacher-as-liminal-servant has indeed shown influence in my own field
of drama/theatre education, primarily in the work of Cecily O'Neill (1995) and her book
Drama worlds: A framework for process drama.
The second metaphor for teaching as performance offered by McLaren is that of teacher-asentertainer that he describes as:
When students were actively engaged by the instructor, but . . . remained isolated
viewers of the action, then the students were being entertained. The classroom was
transformed into a theatre and the students became an audience. In this instance, the
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teacher lost her shamanic function and encountered students in a number of roles: as a
priestly pedagogue or propagandist—or, even worse, an evangelist—for the dominant
culture. (p. 114)
While I can agree that this metaphor for teaching holds unfortunately true for a lot of teaching
practice, I have to take exception to McLaren's anti-theatrical prejudice (see Barish, 1981) in
defining entertainment as theatre. Surely the rich history of theatre across cultures and over
thousands of years cannot be reduced to this simplistic and negative metaphor? Theatre is
itself a form of ritual that often draws on the very ritualized and liminal practices that
McLaren values. And just as surely, the idealized teacher-as-liminal-servant must also be an
effective entertainer in order to engage and draw students “from the confines of social
structures to the seedbeds of creativity located within the antistructure” (p. 115).
Finally, in McLaren's third performative metaphor for teaching, the teacher-as-hegemonicoverlord, “students were not provoked to respond to the teacher's instruction—either verbally,
gesturally or silently in their heads” (p. 114):
The teacher was reduced to a hegemonic overlord and knowledge was passed on
perfunctorily—as though it were a tray of food passed under a cell door. In such a
situation—one that is all too common in our classrooms—the few feet surrounding the
student might as well have been a place of solitary confinement: a numbing state of
spiritual and emotional emptiness. (p. 114)
Again, while I cannot argue with the basic truth represented in this metaphor, I feel uneasy
about the lack of dialectical movement between and among these three teaching as
performance metaphors. It may be difficult to acknowledge, but even the most effective
teacher-as-liminal-servant remains in a power-over relationship with her students; this power
may be suspended in an act of communitas, but it is never entirely absent. As McKenzie
(2001) reminds us in his study, performances of any kind are always centred in some kind of
challenge, whether it is the challenge of creating change or that of maintaining the status quo.
This criticism aside, McLaren's study is groundbreaking in the attention he pays to the rich
and deeply rewarding metaphor of education as ritual performance.
Charles Garoian: Performative Pedagogy
I now move on to the notion of performative pedagogy and the work of Charles Garoian
(1999). Performative pedagogy (also called critical performative pedagogy) is an area that is
just beginning to be addressed in educational scholarship (Conquergood, 1993; Giroux, 1997;
Mackinlay, 2001; Schutz, 2001). Charles Garoian’s (1999) book Performing pedagogy:
Towards an art of politics describes his teaching of performance art in an American secondary
school as a process that, “enables students to learn the curriculum of academic culture from
the perspective of their personal memories and cultural histories” (p. 1). Some of the questions
he poses in his study are:
Prendergast: Teacher as Performer
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How would students’ learning be affected if its form and content were determined
through a community discourse? What role does art play in the development of
community-based curriculum? Is there an aesthetic dimension to curriculum
production? How does curriculum function as performance art text? (p. 14)
He describes his performance art curricula as “transgressive” (p. 40) and “disruptive” (p. 201),
and as a “reflexive pedagogy that would transform my classroom into a space where my
students could discuss openly the cultural issues that mattered to them most, to play with
ideas, metaphors and images, and to create art that represented their cultural struggles” (p.
202). Clearly, Garoian is responding to McLaren's performative challenge to become a
teacher-as-liminal-servant and defines his performance art curriculum, in direct response to
McLaren, as “counterhegemonic” (p. 37).
Garoian's curriculum model for teaching performance art in secondary school places 'The
Body' as its central principle (pp. 46, 73-74) and is thus concerned with consonant theories of
embodiment and embodied practices (see Butler, 1993; Pelias, 1999; Schneider, 1997; Stucky,
2002), or what Peter McLaren (1988) calls “enfleshment”. Pineau's (2005) recent essay on
critical performative pedagogy also posits that those who are committed to critical
performative pedagogy need to focus on the body as the centre of curriculum in three different
ways; as the ideological body (pp. 43-46), the ethnographic body (pp. 46-49) and the
performing body (pp. 49-53). These are three interdisciplinary theoretical foundations, rooted
in embodiment, of performative pedagogy, and the resulting metaphor of teacher as
performance artist.
What I value so much about Garoian's study, from the perspective of PS, are the strong
connections he makes between his own pedagogy and the work of physical theatre and
performance artists such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña (pp. 64-66), Goat Island (pp. 69-97),
Robbie McCauley (pp. 99-124), and Suzanne Lacy (pp. 125-157). It is this kind of research in
performing arts education—in the form of an engaged critical conversation with practicing
artists—that leads to the vital performance art curriculum Garoian theorizes, implements, and
assesses.
Bryant K. Alexander: Pedagogical Interactions as Performance. Anderson and
Gallego’s work (2005) is one other recent text which resonates with the authors presented
above. This anthology of essays includes a reprint of Pineau’s 1994 essay and an essay by coeditor Bryant Alexander entitled, “Critically analyzing pedagogical interactions as
performance.” Alexander reflects on his own teaching practices, both successes and failures,
in a performance theory framework that helps him recognize the power relations and identity
formations at play in his classroom. He concludes:
The classroom is a space of social and political negotiation, a tensive site with
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14
competing intentions. These competing intentions are not about the perceived benefits
of education (i.e., jobs, employment, self-elevation, self-actualization, and so forth).
These intentions focus on the performative processes of education and the struggle of
teachers and students to either gain or retain the authority of their own understandings
as imbued by, with, and through differing cultural insights and experiences. (pp. 58-59)
Alexander is responding to the metaphor of education as spectacle that he defines (quoting
communication theorist F. E. Manning) as, “the principle symbolic context in which . . .
societies enact and communicate their guiding beliefs, values, concerns and selfunderstandings” (Manning cited in Alexander, pp. 58-59). It is my argument here, in
agreement with Alexander, that teachers and students need new and more critically
performative ways to interact with and respond to the omnipresent and continuous spectacles
of culture, politics, economics, and education. Thus Alexander's implicit performance-based
metaphors for teaching are those of teacher as socio-political negotiator, teacher as
creator/critic of spectacles, and teacher as cultural mediator.
R. Keith Sawyer: Improvisatory Pedagogy
One final metaphor for teaching as performance—teacher as improvisational performer—is
found in R. Keith Sawyer's (2004) theorizing of teaching as improvised (as opposed to
scripted) performance:
Teaching has often been thought of as a creative performance. Although comparisons
with performance were originally intended to emphasize teacher creativity, they have
become associated instead with contemporary reform efforts toward scripted
instruction that deny the creativity of teachers. Scripted instruction is opposed to
constructivist, inquiry-based, and dialogic teaching methods that emphasize classroom
collaboration. To provide insight into these methods, the “teaching as performance”
metaphor must be modified: Teaching is improvisational performance. Conceiving of
teaching as improvisation highlights the collaborative and emergent nature of effective
classroom practice, helps us to understand how curriculum materials relate to
classroom practice, and shows why teaching is a creative art. (p. 12)
Sawyer’s metaphorical analysis of teaching heightens our awareness that pedagogy requires a
high level of improvisational ability, involving performative processes of collaboration and
creativity. McLaren (1986/1993) also acknowledges the importance of improvisational ability
as a key aspect of teacher-as-liminal-servant:
The liminal servant understands teaching to be essentially an improvised drama. To
fully understand the subtext of the student, the liminal servant must 'become' the
student as part of
the dramatic encounter. While in the thrall of such a drama, the
liminal servant knows that the results will often be unpredictable; that understanding,
like play, has a spirit of its own. (p. 117)
Prendergast: Teacher as Performer
15
No class is ever the same way twice, just as no live performance can be. This inherent aspect
of liveness and improvisation that links teaching and performance strengthens the case made
implicitly herein for the introduction of both performance studies and improvisational skill
development into teacher education (see also Lockford & Pelias, 2004). A deeper
understanding of performance processes combined with opportunities to 'perform pedagogy' in
more critical, collaborative, and improvisational ways could become a significant aspect of
teacher education that might potentially support emerging educators entering the field more
successfully than currently seems to be the case.
To conclude this section, it appears that critical pedagogues have been interested in taking
some key concepts from performance theory and applying them to pedagogical praxis.
Metaphorically speaking, as the focus of this present essay, these understandings can be
represented as follows:
Teacher as
● aesthete/artist
● innovator
● subverter
● processor
● critic
● liminal servant
● entertainer
● hegemonic overlord
● performance artist
● transgressor
● disrupter
● embodier
● socio-political negotiator
● creator/critic of spectacles
● cultural mediator
● improviser
● collaborator
How does this list of metaphors compare with the one offered in Part I of this essay? What
seems clear to me is a lessened focus on poetics in favour of politics. While critical
pedagogues seem to recognize teachers as artists and performers, these metaphoric visions are
constructed as very specific types of artists and performers; namely, those who are allied with
movements interested in social justice and social change. Performance theory shares this
interest, certainly, but is broad-based enough in its interdisciplinary foundations and interests
to not necessarily conflate performance with resistance. Much of performance, as McKenzie
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16
(2001) reminds us, is about conformity and the status quo and critical pedagogy ignores these
larger theoretical views of performance in favor of appropriating what 'works' within that subfield of education. The risk here is a reductionist metaphor of teaching/performance as
politics, and a consonant risk of a devaluing of the all-important aesthetics of both teaching
and performance.
Conclusion
I end on a cautionary note. While I am personally and professionally in solidarity with the
various writers I have surveyed here in critical performative pedagogy, I am somewhat
concerned with the rather narrow usage of performance theory that I see in their writing. The
bibliographies I have examined seem to feature far more critical pedagogy than performance
theory as source material. While Conquergood's work, and some of Schechner's does appear,
there has, to date, been little focus on drawing as widely as possible on the field of
performance theory and PS. This problem is particularly apparent in the anthology
Performance theories in education (Alexander et. al, 2005) where a brief glance at the Author
Index reveals a ratio between those in critical pedagogy and related fields and those in
performance studies of approximately 20 to 1 (pp. 263-268). This essay is intended as a small
corrective in this regard, although it is limited in its scope as well. New texts on performance
are consistently emerging, and many of these studies will contain within them potentially
significant interdisciplinary applications to education.
While my criticism of critical pedagogy's use of performance theories may seem somewhat
like setting up a 'straw man'—of course critical pedagogy focuses on the socio-political
aspects of teaching, and thus does so with its application of performance theories—my aim is
simply to call attention to the complex ways that performance has become understood and
theorized in the field of PS. This complexity embraces a broadly-based conception of
performance that weaves itself through everyday life as ritual, sociology, psychology,
linguistics, anthropology, politics, and performance art and into the range of cultural practices
that we name artistic or aesthetic performances (theatre, dance and music) (see Carlson
[1996/2004] for an excellent survey on this topic). To limit the understanding of performance
to its more socio-political aspects is, in my view, to weaken the potential interdisciplinary and
metaphorical applications of this rich discourse.
I have attempted here to draw together some key studies in the field of performance theory and
critical performative pedagogy that highlight a wide range of metaphorical understandings of
teacher as performer. These metaphoric understandings of pedagogy offer the beginnings only
of new ways of seeing teaching as much closer to artistic processes concerned with cultural
efficacy than to economic or technological processes concerned with efficiency and
effectiveness (McKenzie, 2001). These metaphors create a welcome space in teacher
Prendergast: Teacher as Performer
17
education for the study of both performance theory and critical performative pedagogy.
Teachers must be nurtured and supported to see themselves as interpretive performers of
curriculum and as critically interactive spectators in their students’ performance of learning.
Educational research needs to attend more closely to root metaphors of cultural performance
as templates for curriculum and to encourage the exploration of power, identity and
community as vital pedagogical practices.
References
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About the Author
Monica Prendergast is currently a federally-funded postdoctoral researcher at the University of
British Columbia. She completed her PhD in interdisciplinary studies (theatre/curriculum &
instruction) at the University of Victoria in 2006. Her work has appeared previously in IJEA,
Research in Drama Education, Journal of Aesthetic Education, and Qualitative Inquiry. A coauthored essay with Carl Leggo on poetry and spirituality appears in the International
Handbook of Research in Arts Education (2007). Her dissertation, Teaching spectatorship:
Essays and poems on audience in performance, will be published in 2008 by Cambria Press.
Monica may be reached at [email protected].
IJEA Vol. 9 No. 2 - http://www.ijea.org/v9n2/
International Journal of Education & the Arts
Editors
Liora Bresler
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A.
Margaret Macintyre Latta
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, U.S.A.
Managing Editor
Alex Ruthmann
Indiana State University, U.S.A.
Associate Editors
David G. Hebert
Boston University, U.S.A.
Pauline Sameshima
Washington State University, U.S.A
Editorial Board
Peter F. Abbs
University of Sussex, U.K.
Eunice Boardman
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A.
Norman Denzin
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A.
Kieran Egan
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Elliot Eisner
Stanford University, U.S.A.
Magne Espeland
Stord/Haugesund University College, Norway
Rita Irwin
University of British Columbia, Canada
Gary McPherson
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A.
Julian Sefton-Green
University of South Australia, Australia
Robert E. Stake
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A.
Susan Stinson
University of North Carolina—Greensboro , U.S.A.
Graeme Sullivan
Teachers College, Columbia University, U.S.A.
Christine Thompson
Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A.
Elizabeth (Beau) Valance
Indiana University, Bloomington, U.S.A.
Peter Webster
Northwestern University, U.S.A.
20